Monday, November 30, 2009

Fox News has an exclusive report on two documents they recently received relating to UNEP (United Nations Environment Program). The first, The UNEP We Want, is the report of an unpublicized meeting two years ago where UNEP leaders plotted out a strategy for their organization. The second document, an official UNEP document from the Governing Board, further outlines the organizations goals and strategies through 2013.

The proposals and ambitions of the UNEP as set forth in those documents are breathtaking and insidious. One of the goals stated in the "UNEP We Want" document is to promote and raise global warming to the status of a religion:

The environment should compete with religion as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity.

We know already that many on the left have embraced climate change with religious fervor, but for the UN to actually begin to push climate change as a pseudo religious alternative in "competition" with Christianity or Judaism, etc., that is an entirely different matter. There is so much wrong with that ambition it is hard to know where to begin. As a threshold matter, what would moor the values of an eco-religion, one with no God - or goddess - save for Gaia, as interpreted by the UNEP's high priests. Where are moral lines to be drawn?

Will thieving still be a sin, or will it now be acceptable when done on an international scale to redistribute wealth. What constitutes immoral corruption under this new religion? In America, we think of ourselves as free of sin when we act within the spirit and letter of judeo-christian moral strictures. But our new high priest would see things differently. Indeed, the IPCC Chairman, within the past few days, has labeled all of us in Western society as corrupt because we consume too much. Thus, must we, as the most diligent and successful of western nations, perform the greatest penance.

For another example, how about enforced sterilization? If you think I am joking, know that more than one green, including recently the NYT environmental reporter, has suggested that we need to limit the number of children we have to protect Gaia, so why not?

Lastly, religion is founded upon faith in an omnipotent being - something incapable of proof - and it is a being that holds us to fixed standards that have stood for two millennium. Science, by its very definition, has nothing to do with faith. Scientific truths must be capable of reproduction and proof positive - and then what we do in relation to that science will change as the science changes. Thus there can be no fixed and immutable values in the UNEP's new proposed religion. If the UNEP claims immutable values, then it jettisons its scientific foundations for faith and zealotry in response to whatever values of the moment the UNEP leaders decide to specify. That is not religion, its Orwellian.

So how does the UNEP intend to go about the proselytizing for this new religion? Their plan is to extend their efforts beyond governments and go directly to "children and youth" as well as other private entities that can assist in their propagandizing mission.

Whether in some measure in response to UNEP's efforts or, more likely because our educational system seems largely in the hands of the left wing, anecdotal evidence suggests that proselytizing for Gaia is well under way. Just today in the NY Post, a columnist writes of her jaw dropping when her five year old child came home from school singing " . . . You can hear the warning -- GLOBAL WARMING . . . " It was "The Warming Song" taught to all the children to sing at a concert. As the columnist writes: "Further song lyrics scolded selfish adults (that would be us) for polluting our planet and causing a warming scourge that would, in no short order, kill all the polar bears and threaten the birds and bees." Likewise, see this post I did some months ago on an essay by a young girl that won an award at her school. In it, the young essayist displays a complete grasp of all the global warming propaganda, right down to the concept of our own original sin - it wasn't Eve biting the apple that caused the sin, it was Eve disposing of the apple core in an non-eco-friendly, non-organic plastic bag (just joking on the last bit, but not by much).

Not satisfied with religious status, the UNEP has other very ambitious goals spelled out in broad language. The UNEP wants to insinuate the environment directly into the heart of world economic decision making and it seeks the authority to "command" national compliance with global warming regulations.

As to the former, UNEP does not go into great detail, but they speak generally of a "major restructuring of international institutions to merge environmental issues with economics as the central priority." We can get a flavor of what that could well mean from a "Green New Deal" proposed by NEF in the UK. Getting into specifics, what they seek is a command economy with economic control exercised to promote green values. They explicitly call for much higher interest rates to limit consumption, but with targeted lower interest rates to promote green objectives, spending of 1% of GDP on subsidizing all things green - and of course, "massive" transfers of wealth to poorer nations. It should be noted that UNEP also has a Green New Deal, though it speaks in very general terms, all of which could encompass the specifics of the similarly named NEF plan just discussed.

As to the UNEP's grandiose plans for exercising at least some aspects of sovereign power over all nations, this from the Fox article:

[UNEP seeks] new environmental rules, regulations and standards, and the linking of existing environmental agreements, in a stronger global lattice-work of environmental law, with stronger authority to command national governments. The Swiss paper calls it a series of "ambitious yet incremental adjustments" to international environmental governance. Indeed, the document says, UNEP's "role is to 'tee up' the next generation of such rules."

It any of this sounds benign, you are not paying attention. This is moving towards a one world government with UNEP having a say over economic regulation and the right to enforce climate change regulation - and on the latter, because carbon is a gas inextricably involved in every aspect of life on earth, UNEP would have carteblanche to regulate any and every aspect of our lives, all in the interest of being green.

If you want to see how this works, look no further than the EU, which over the past twenty years has gone incrementally down this exact same path, slowly accreting power and "teeing up" for the next creep. It is now the world largest socialist, anti-democratic organization with sovereign authority over virtually all of Europe.

At any rate, we now stand two years out from the date of these UNEP documents, in the midst of Climategate, and but days away from Obama's jetting to Copenhagen to give his commitment to this insanity. So what of these plans. This from Fox News:

"According to Halle . . .in an e-mail exchange with Fox News, there are signs that the hugely ambitious role he and his fellow-thinkers sketched for UNEP as religion's main competitor are "beginning to happen." Halle pointed to UNEP's espousal this year of a so-called Green Economy Initiative, a proposal to radically redesign the global economy and transfer trillions of dollars in investment to the world's poorest developing countries, but one that is couched in terms of providing new green jobs, an end to old, unfair carbon-based energy subsidies, and greater global fairness and opportunity. Halle called the development "quite exciting."

The Green Economy Initiative, also called the Global Green New Deal, is a major counterpart to the new treaty on greenhouse gas suppression that all branches of the United Nations, and a horde of environmental organizations, are lobbying loudly to bring to agreement at the environmental summit in Copenhagen. . . ."

This is all breathtaking and a direct threat to the American way of life. It we do not fight this utter insanity tooth and nail, we will have failed our issue for generations to come. We will be responsible for their loss of freedom Probably the first place to start is with how schools are educating our children. Are they proselytizing for the ever cooling warming Gaia. If you don't know, you should, and if so, it is time for a talk with the school chain of command. In law, we have to get Congress to take environmental policy in the U.S. out of the courtrooms so that never again do we have a liberal clique of five non-scientists on the Supreme Court dictating that the EPA has to regulate carbon. We have to insure that Cap and Trade is never passed. And we have to make sure that Climategate stays at the forefront of every debate over this insanity until there is a stake through the heart of global warming.

Beyond that, I am becoming ever more inclined to see the wisdom of Dr. Richard North, he of EU Referendum, who has taken to finishing many a post with his own modern equivalent of Cato's famous refrain, "Carthagodelenda est:"

In the end, there are going to be two groups of people in this world: the greenies and the people who shoot greenies. It's kill or be killed, and the greenies will be the death of us all if this madness continues.

We have several updates to the Climategate saga. The IPCC's Chairman Mao makes some outrageous remarks and defends the validity of climate science on the grounds that Obama is coming to Copenhagen. Shannon Love gives a brilliant analysis of the problems of peer review in the climate science arena. And Dr. Dan Easterbrook has some choice words for Paul Krugman on how scientists conduct their business.

The IPCC's Chairman Mao, Rajendra Pachauri (see Climategate Update 5 below) takes the CRU scientists to task - for being so stupid as to write down what they did in the e-mails instead of just phoning the comments to each other. The Chairman claims no investigation is warranted of the e-mails - though of the leaker, that's another story. Lastly, he states that the leaked tranche of e-mails and data from the CRU are of no importance, noting that Obama agreed to come to Copenhagen and commit the US to carbon reductions after the CRU tranche was released to the public:

. . . Pachauri was responding to one email from 2004 in which Professor Phil Jones, the head of the climatic research unit at UEA, said of two papers he regarded as flawed: "I can't see either … being in the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Pachauri said it was not clear whether the wording of the emails reflected the scientists' intended actions, but said: "I really think people should be discreet … in this day and age anything you write, even privately, could become public and to put anything down in writing is, to say the least, indiscreet … It is another matter to talk about this to your friends on the telephone or person to person but to put it down in writing was indiscreet. If someone was to say something like this in an IPCC authors' meeting then there are others who would chew him up."

Jones has denied any suggestion that he tried to suppress scientific evidence he disagreed with or that he manipulated data.

Some commentators, including the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the environmental campaigner and Guardian writer George Monbiot, have called on Jones to resign but Pachauri said he did not agree. He said an independent inquiry into the emails would achieve little, but there should be a criminal investigation into how the emails came to light.

Pachauri said he doubted that trust in the IPCC would be damaged by the affair. "People who are aware of how the IPCC functions and are appreciative of the credibility that the IPCC has attained will probably not be swayed by an incident of this kind," he said.

He pointed out that five days after the emails were made public, Barack Obama announced a major commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

(emphasis added) Read the entire article. All of that is so over the top ridiculous I am forced to laugh through my outrage. And as an ancillary question, does this cement Obama's position as the most useful of idiots?

Shannon Love has written an insightful article regarding peer review in the context of climate science where so much now relies on complex computer programs to arrive at finished data. Peer reviewers do not have the time to review the programs and, in any case, are never provided with them. This effectively negates any claim that peer review is a gold standard - let alone any standard - for the reliability of the data and conclusions in the article. Ms. Love's solution is very practical:

Eric S. Raymond, the famous computer scientist and writer, has called for open source science. I think this is the way we should go. In the past, it cost too much to print out all a study’s data and records on paper and ship that paper all over the world. With the internet, we have no such limitations. All scientific studies should upon publication put online all of their raw data, all of their protocols, all of their procedures, all of their records and the code for all of their custom-written software. There is no practical reason anymore why only a summary of a scientist’s work should be made public.

Scientific software has grown too large and complex to be maintained and verified by a handful of individuals. Only by marshaling a scientific “Army of Davids” can we hope to verify the accuracy and precision of the software we are increasingly using to make major public decisions.

In the short term, we need to aggressively challenge those who assert that studies that use complex custom software have been “peer reviewed” in any meaningful way. In the long term, we have a lot of scientific work to do over again.

Noted climate scientist far left polemicist Paul Krugman appeared on Meet the Press over the weekend. He dismissed the e-mails as typical harmless banter among academics and explained to America that, despite what they may have read, there was nothing in the CRU e-mails that amounted to a "smoking gun." That brought a heated response from actual scientist Dr. Don Easterbrook:

I've spent four decades studying global climate change and as a scientist I am appalled at [NYT's Paul] Krugman's cavalier shrugging off the Hadley email scandal as 'just the way scientists talk among themselves.' That's like saying it's alright for politicians to be corrupt because that's the way they are.

Legitimate scientists do not doctor data, delete data they don't like, hide data they don't want seen, hijack the peer review process, personally attack other scientists whose views differ from theirs, send fraudulent data to the IPCC that is used to perpetuate the greatest hoax in the history of science, provide false data to further legislation on climate change that will result in huge profits for corrupt lobbyists and politicians, and tell outright lies about scientific data.

Our war against radical Islam has always been a two front war. We have succeeded to this point in the physical war against radical Islam. We are losing completely in the equally if not more important of the two wars - the war of ideas. We are doing nothing to beat back jihadism on the ideological plane. What was unforgivable cowardice under George Bush has been made worse under the anti-American fantasy of Obama.

Yesterday, Tom Friedman and FouadAjami wrote about different aspects of the war of ideas. Friedman writes that the jihadi narrative - that the U.S. is at war with all of Islam and responsible for the many ills of the Arab world - has now saturated the Muslim world. Ajami writes that Obama's prostration before the Arab world, apologizing for the sins of America and whitewashing the Arab world of responsibility for its plight, have fallen flat, not merely engendering no upturn in support for America, but causing disillusionment.

Friedman, writing at the NYT, gives us his opinion of the Maj. NadalHassan mass murder at Fort Hood. As he sees it, Hassan was fully infected by the jihadist narrative, and that narrative has now become ascendant in the Muslim world:

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.

Although most of the Muslims being killed today are being killed by jihadist suicide bombers in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Indonesia, you’d never know it from listening to their world. The dominant narrative there is that 9/11 was a kind of fraud: America’s unprovoked onslaught on Islam is the real story, and the Muslims are the real victims — of U.S. perfidy.

Have no doubt: we punched a fist into the Arab/Muslim world after 9/11, partly to send a message of deterrence, but primarily to destroy two tyrannical regimes — the Taliban and the Baathists — and to work with Afghans and Iraqis to build a different kind of politics. In the process, we did some stupid and bad things. But for every AbuGhraib, our soldiers and diplomats perpetrated a million acts of kindness aimed at giving Arabs and Muslims a better chance to succeed with modernity and to elect their own leaders.

The Narrative was concocted by jihadists to obscure that.

It’s working. As a Jordanian-born counterterrorism expert, who asked to remain anonymous, said to me: “This narrative is now omnipresent in Arab and Muslim communities in the region and in migrant communities around the world. . . .

[Obama] has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not "unclenched their fist," nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can't journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can't journey to Cairo to tell the fabled "Arab street" that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can't tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again.

It was the norm for American liberalism during the Bush years to brandish the Pew Global Attitudes survey that told of America's decline in the eyes of foreign nations. Foreigners were saying what the liberals wanted said.

Now those surveys of 2009 bring findings from the world of Islam that confirm that the animus toward America has not been radically changed by the ascendancy of Mr. Obama. In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn't seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that's reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.

Mr. Obama's election has not drained the swamps of anti-Americanism. That anti-Americanism is endemic to this region, an alibi and a scapegoat for nations, and their rulers, unwilling to break out of the grip of political autocracy and economic failure. It predated the presidency of George W. Bush and rages on during the Obama presidency.

We had once taken to the foreign world that quintessential American difference—the belief in liberty, a needed innocence to play off against the settled and complacent ways of older nations. The Obama approach is different.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others. . . .

Both of the above articles highlight a theme sounded repeatedly on this blog - it is incumbent on our leaders to be honest with our nation and with Muslims. It is incumbent that they identify the source of radicalism in the Muslim world and honestly name it. It is incumbent that they explain the threat and shine a blinding light on this cancer.

Without identifying the source of "radical Islam" and shining a light on all of the relevant aspects of the source, we are incapable of developing a coherent national and international strategy to that will meet and defeat this cancer. Identifying the source of radical Islam and explaining about it to America is a fundamental duty of our government. And on this, our government has failed.

This failure has other significant ramifications. It leaves our populace without the knowledge to distinguish between a particularly dangerous ideology and a benign one - both of them being interspersed among us and throughout the world. This will lead to a tendency to lump all Muslims under one banner [note - this is precisely what Obama did in his Cairo speach]. Most critically, it will marginalize and cut off from support those Muslims who would fight against the Salifization of their religion. And indeed, as this is in large measure an ideological struggle, it it the fight they will wage that will determine the future of Islam. We need to insure they win over Salafi Islam.

And there is yet another critical aspect to the the governments use of euphanisms to describe "radical Islam." It falsely implies that radical Islam is merely an anamoly. By doing that, our government provides cover for Wahhabi / SalafiIslamists to continue to spread their ideology free of criticism and publicity. This only allows the problems created by that Salafi Islam to fester and metastasize. It will only compounds the costs that we will eventually have to pay if and when things get to a point where some action must be taken against these purveyors of hatred, death and triumphalism.

If anyone has any doubts that the Salafi/Wahhabi sect is the font of jihadism, please see this short autobiography from former terrorist, Tawfiq Hamid.

Bush failed in his duty, likely because naming Salafism / Wahhabism was considered too impolitic. Obama, on the other hand, seems dangerously clueless. His Muslim "advisors" are, according to ZuhdiJasser, stacked with "political Islamists" and, indeed, one not long ago spoke out in favor of shariah law. His Cairo speech treating Salafi terrorists and apolitical Muslim as the same - equal members in a single Muslim ummah - was a disaster. He did nothing more in that speech then reiterate the "Narrative" and then excuse Arab regimes for the failings with ridiculous claims of moral equivalence. We now see its resonance.

The bottom line of all of this is that we could stay in Iraq and Afghanistan for the next half century and still not defeat the threat of "radical Islam." We can't because it is an idea, and until we engage in the war of ideas, we can expect the threat from radical salafists to continue to metastasize. Indeed, under Obama, it seems to be growing apace.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Obama's amateurism is showing up nowhere as clearly - and arguably nowhere as dangerously - as in relation to Iran. The clock has been ticking on the Iran problem for years. Yet Senator Obama led the charge to tie President Bush's hands in dealing with the mad mullahs. Since being sworn in, Obama has bent over backwards to treat the mad mullahs as legitimate rulers. His efforts have been not merely fruitless, but worse, they have emboldened the mad mullahs. Not only have the mullahs rejected every offer from the international community regarding their uranium enrichment program, not only have the mad mullahs brought the IAEA investigation of their nuclear program to a standstill, but today the mad mullahs announced that they intend to build ten more nuclear plants similar to the once "secret" military plant under construction just south of Tehran.

The stakes in the kabuki dance Obama is playing with Iran's mad mullahs could not be higher. Iran is the single most destabilizing influence in the Middle East. Its regime is wholly illegitimate, ruling its populace by brute force and terror. It is a regime that is on the brink and becomes ever more unstable as its hold on power is threatened. Every day Iran is allowed to continue its nuclear program is a day closer to war in the Middle East - at first between Iran and Israel, then likely expanding into a larger conflagration involving Iran's many surrogates and the U.S. Moreover, every day Iran is allowed to continue its nuclear program is a day closer to the reality of nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East - the ultimate nightmare scenario.

Obama, from his days running for the President, demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the motivations of Iran's mad mullahs. Obama the amateur thought that they were rational. They are not. Obama the amateur thought they would respond to economic incentives to better the plight of Iranians, but the truth is and has always been that the regime's motivation is to, first and foremost, spread the radical Khomeinist revolution. The mullah's see becoming a nuclear power as central to their goal. Obama the amateur attempted to assure the regime that we pose no threat by defunding every program that we had in place to further regime change in Iran. Obama the amateur showed the regime he could work with them by ignoring the regime's brutality and human rights violation in their treatment of protesting citizenry. The regime responded by ever more brutality against protesters and sending a team into Iraqi territory to capture three U.S. hostages - all of whom are still being held. Obama the amateur now has demanded that the regime cease work on their nulear enrichment. Is it any wonder that the response of the mad mullahs is to say no, but rather that they will build ten more nuclear reactors.

Obama has no sense of history and a world view so distorted as to border on fantasy. History would have informed Obama that the one and only thing that the Iranian regime responds to is a threat to their hold on the country. Thus, Obama's two best options, were to articulate a credible threat to use military force against Iran and to make robust those programs designed to reach behind the regime and connect with the most combustible force in Iran today, its citizenry. Both of these acts would have given teeth to Obama's negotiations with Iran. Further, once it became clear that Iran was a tinder keg with much of the population in open revolt, Obama should have upped the ante, focusing the world's attention on the regime's illegitimacy and expanding covert operations inside Iran to stymie the regime's efforts to shut down communications platforms that would allow the citizens to talk to one another.

Obama forswore all of the above under the beliefs that everyone wants a world without nuclear weapons, that no country should attempt to dictate terms to another, and that if we just appeased the mullahs, they would cooperate. Thus Obama has severely limited our options and emboldened an Iranian regime that is the closest thing to pure evil as I have seen in my lifetime. An emboldened Iran is now less likely to respond threats of force as it will not see them as credible, and every day it grows closer to a nuclear arsenal. Obama is well on his way to painting us into a corner where the only remaining options are actual use of force - or complete appeasement, a la Chamberlain's England. The latter will only get more Americans killed in the long run. That is what it means to have an amateur in the Presidency.

Like the band on the Titanic, even while Climategate explodes around him, IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri keeps on playing, seemingly oblivious. Pachauri shown above sporting - appropriately - a Mao outfit, stated in an interview with the UK's Observer "that western society must undergo a radical value shift if the worst effects of climate change were to be avoided." According to our green Mao, he seeks his own Cultural Revolution:

"Today we have reached the point where consumption and people's desire to consume has grown out of proportion. . . The reality is that our lifestyles are unsustainable. . . ."

The IPCC Chairman seeks to wholly rework our lifestyles. He wants heavy taxation of air travel with the proceeds being used to subsidize other forms of public travel. He wants government to "curb driving" by using price "to regulate the use of private vehicles." He wants us to "eat less meat because of the levels of carbon emissions associated with rearing livestock." He even wants restaurants to stop serving ice water unless the customer asks for it.

Paruchi, calling modern Western Culture "corrupt," proposes taking a page from the 20th century's other towering communist, Lenin. He sees his green revolution succeeding based on the education of our children. Unfortunately, as I point out here and here, he has reason to believe that such a strategy will work.

Lastly, the Anchoress posted a must-read essay on Climategate. She covers the topic from a wide variety of aspects, including the following, which dovetails perfectly with my comments above on IPCC Chairman Paruchi:

To suggest that large-numbers of privileged people flying scores of private planes to exotic locals, gorging themselves on fine fare while deciding how the common folk ought to live, in order to “save” the planet from AGW was bizarre, wasteful and hypocritical in an era of video-conferencing, was to be sniffed at as “insipid.” Didn’t one understand the power of the Gore Indulgence carbon-offset? Just pay some money to the man with the absolute moral authority on all things green, and your sins are covered. Somewhere, a tree is planted.

Voila. It seems that not all of us in the West are corrupt when viewed through green lenses, high atop Mount IPCC.

Today we learn that East Anglia's CRU, the world's leading institutuion for "climate science," dumped the raw data for their climate record of temperatures over the past 150 odd years. This from the Times:

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. . . .

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building. . . .

It is difficult to imagine any scientist destroying raw data, irrespective of storage space. That said, one could take this as mere sloppiness tantamount to incompetence on the part of the CRU, but deleting raw data seems to happen with some frequency at that institution. This from Watts Up With That:

Flashback to April 18th…

Dear Tom,

I find it hard to believe that the British Antarctic Survey would permit the deletion of relevant files for two recent publications or that there aren’t any backups for the deleted data on institutional servers. Would you mind inquiring for me? In the mean time, would you please send me the PP format files that you refer to here for the monthly sea ice data for the 20th century models discussed in your GRL article and the 21st century models referred to in your JGR article.

Regards, Steve McIntyre

Then in July… “Unprecedented” Data Purge At CRU

On Monday, July 27, 2009, as reported in a prior thread, CRU deleted three files pertaining to station data from their public directory ftp.cru.uea.ac.uk/. The next day, on July 28, Phil Jones deleted data from his public file – see screenshot with timestemp in post here, leaving online a variety of files from the 1990s as shown in the following screenshot taken on July 28, 2009.

This just all seems too much. How much of all this raw data jettisoning is mere gross incompetence and how much is deliberate remains to be seen. What is clear is that CRU data for which no raw data exists and all studies since that have relied upon such CRU data have zero reliablity at the moment. Tigerhawk sums up the ramifications:

So, basically we are being asked to restructure the entire economy of the planet on the say-so of a few "scientists" whose work cannot be verified or even reconstructed. Is there any intellectually honest person who thinks that is a good idea?

Saturday, November 28, 2009

While much of the left wing MSM and the AGW community are studiously ignoring Climategate, at least one group is not. That group is the academic institutions who have staked a good portion of their reputations on their association with climate science. Today we get two bits of news.

The first is from Britain, where East Anglia University officials seem to have stepped into this damning controversy with both feat. The University announced today that its Climate Research Unit will in fact make all of its data and programs publicly available at the earliest opportunity. That is huge. It marks a complete reversal in the way the CRU has been allowed to conduct its business for over a decade. One wonders who was read the riot act on that one.

The second major bit of news comes from Penn St. University where Michael Mann, he of hockey stick graph fame, is now being investigated by the University over the issues raised in the hacked CRU e-mails and data. One gets the sense that this latter may be simply pro forma, given that Penn St. previously gave a pass to Mann after the hockey stick controversy. None-the-less, the process has begun and may develop into a true investigation if, as widely believed by skeptics, the release of data shows conclusivelywidescale data manipulation.

Lastly, Mark Steyntakes to task a Wapo criticism of the blogging world as wholly dependent on dinosaur media for its story base. As Steyn notes, that's "laughably untrue" when it comes to Climategate. The blogging world has sunk into this one with the tenacity of a pit bull, while reading the MSM, one would have little to no idea that any controversy is even afoot.

As I worte in a post earlier this year, "the acceptance, and indeed, ascendancy of socialism across most of the Western world is a testament to the strategy of Lenin and his progeny - to control the education of children." Ceding the educational system to the left is, perhaps, the most fundamentel failing of our nation.

In order to control the education of our young, it is incumbent on the left to influence, if not control, the teachers of our children. Thus we see people such as Bill Ayers making it their life's work to "teach the teachers." All of this ilk propose a curriculum that emphasizes the teaching of "social justice," a toxic mix combining the socialism, multiculturalism and identity politics of the far left. It is almost always coupled with a deemphasis on history.

There can be no doubt that the left has largely succeeded in this effort. The vast majority of those in the education profession identify themselves as left wing. The effect on our education system has been devastating. As summed up by Robert Martin, publishing in "Business First,"

As many as 20 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate, and our high school math and science achievement test scores rank near the bottom of industrialized nations.

But the victory for the left has not yet been complete and the left's efforts to destroy any last vestiage of heretical thought continues unabated. The most recent example comes from the Univ. of Minnesotta, where College of Education was considering adopting a litmus test to screen out any who would not fully adopt the "social justice" curriculum.

A program proposed at the University of Minnesota would result in required examinations of teacher candidates on "white privilege" as well as "remedial re-education" for those who hold the "wrong" views, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

. . . "If the Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group achieves its stated goals, the result will be political and ideological screening of applicants, remedial re-education for those with the 'wrong' views and values, [and] withholding of degrees from those upon whom the university's political reeducation efforts proved ineffective."

. . . Among the issues discussed in the plans are requirements that teachers would be able to instruct students on the "myth of meritocracy" in the United States, "the history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values," and the "history of white racism."

The demands appear to be similar to those promoted earlier at the University of Delaware. . . .

You can read the entire horror story here. There are many things that need to happen in our schools. Curriculum needs to be returned to content neutrality, with the social justice and left wing advocacy stripped from the class rooms. Students need to learn the basic skills, history, economics and financial management. Social justice and advocacy for any particular philosophy is a parent's job. How do we get to something akin to this, given the current state of our education system? I don't know, but I am sure of one thing, Lenin was right. We fail to figure out how to stop this insidious march at our own peril - as well as that of our children.

As I said in my post below, Climategate and Surrealism, Climategate will only fully flower when AGW scientists begin to turn on each other in an effort to salvage their careers and, indeed, the legitimacy of science itself. We now have another another significant crack in the AGW armor, this from Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia as he strongly criticizes the IPCC and his fellow researchers. He characterizes the IPCC meeting in Copenhagen as "raw politics, not . . . the politics of science," states that the IPCC has been at the heart of politicizing climate science, and suggests that the IPCC has "run its course." Commenting on the e-mails made public, Mr. Hulme makes a damning, if understated, indictment of his colleagues:

This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.

That is a tactful way to put it. What makes it all the more interesting is that Hulme is an "insider" in the top echelon of the AGW community who is, as Bishop Hill points out, implicated in some of nefarious practices outlined in the now public CRU e-mails.

Hulmes' act of AGW canabalism / attempt at self-preservation comes on the heals of the calls of many, such as Chritopher Booker at The Telegraph, who are much less tactful in their assments:

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age."

The government mandates and subsidies have now led to a glut of ethanol, with the Obama EPA considering upping the blending requirements from 10% ethanol to 20% or more to take care of all the profiteers who, enticed by the government, have invested heavilly in expanding ethanol production. Think of it as the agricultural equivalent of doubling down on the AIG bailout - a bad idea set now to get exponentially worse. This will only further depress food production and raise food prices concomitantly. But in an added twist, requiring a higher ethanol mix threatens the integrity of our car engines. The only things not mentioned by the Hot Air authors are that increasing the ethanol mix in gasoline also lowers fuel economy (E20 lowers it by 7.7% over pure gasoline) and has a very adverse effect on small non-road engines.

. . . having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic

Dictionary.com

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's annual conference is occurring next week in Copenhagen. Could anything be more surreal than Obama, blithely going to Copenhagen to announce that he will commit the U.S. to a massive, economy busting reduction in carbon dioxide in order to combat global warming just days after release of a massive tranche of e-mails, data and programs, all of which paint a picture of junk, manipulated and politicized “climate science.”

_____________________________________________________

The e-mails from East Anglia University's CRU, released publicly by someone last week ,have been a bomb thrown into the middle of the man-made global warming community (AGW) – albeit a silent bomb (thus raising the deeply philosophical question, if a tree containing climatologically significant tree ring data falls in a forest and the NYT pretends not to hear it, does it make a noise?)

The CRU tranche are proof of what many have posited for years. That is that the “science” behind the global warming juggernaut (or, as Mark Steyn called it, a tree ring circus) has been manipulated to the point of falsification.

Even absent the CRU tranche, it is beyond argument that the ever shriller cries of the AGW'istas have become ever more disconnected from reality. AGW posits that as carbon dioxide levels rise, global temperatures will rise. The problems with this theory are manifold. For example, all evidence indicates that the Medieval Warm Period, a period of minimal human contribution to global carbon dioxide, was hotter than today. We have had many periods of warming and cooling since then. Indeed, by the end of the "Little Cooling" that occurred from about 1940 to 1975, the dominant scientific scare was the return of an ice age.

And then there is the giant pink elephant in the room. For the last fifteen years, even while carbon dioxide levels have steadily risen, the earth has not seen a corresponding increase in temperature. To the contrary, there has actually been global cooling. Even before the release of the CRU data, we knew that not a single computer program relied by the AGW crowd to predict future catastrophe predicted this turn of events. In short, all of the AGW programs are fundamentally – and fatally – flawed. What the CRU tranche has done has been to turn well founded suspicion into verifiable reality. Indeed, to quote from a now public e-mail of the UN's lead IPCC scientist, Kevin Trenberth:

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.

I for one concur.

So how do the world's small clique of “top climate scientists” manage to keep alive the AGW canard that it is a consensus among scientists that man is causing global warming? Here is what is spelled out in the CRU tranche of e-mails:

- refuse to provide their raw data and computer code so that their findings can't be verified and tested (particularly galling, since that is what defines “science.” How the AGW crowd could get away with this for years is a strong indication that much of climate science” is utterly corrupt. It is good to hear calls throughout the scientific community for complete transparency in future climate research, such as this from Dr. Judith Curry - though if you read the comments, you will see a plethora of AGW ideologues disagreeing with her, claiming withholding such information is justified because otherwise the studies would be subject to countless attacks by "deniers.")

- manipulate data to minimize evidence of cooling and maximize, if not create out of whole cloth, warming trends;

- seek to prevent the publication of any “peer reviewed” articles calling AGW into question;

- conspire to remove journal editors who allowed publication of papers that questioned the "consensus” of AGW

- make scurrilous and ad hominem attacks on scientists who contest AGW; and,

- in all of this, they are supported by a vast conglomerate of European and American left wing politicians, left wing media, and rent seekers, all of whom have deeply vested interests in seeing AGW accepted as truth and acted upon in the policy sphere.

As James Lewis writes at PJM:

. . . The most important take home lesson is that global frauding was the clear and conscious work of a political machine aiming to steal your money, your liberties, and your country. It was a massive, worldwide attempt at a coup d’etat, and the victims were going to include all the free and prosperous peoples of the world. Hitler had his Reichstag fire. Today’s transnational left had its global warming fraud. The political goal was exactly the same: maximum power through maximum fear.

All of the above is evidence of a system and people corrupt at their core. But that said, the true smoking gun lies in the actual manipulation of the supposed objective data these individuals have published. It is on these numbers and extrapolations that these "scientists" have asked us, for years, to take on faith. But now, at least a part of their programs and raw data are now in the public domain. As A.J Strata explains:

As I suspected when this story broke, the minor problem for the AGW alarmists was dealing with the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods. The big headache was the warm period prior to 1960, which we can see in the CRU data was equal to or higher than today. This warm period in the first half of the last century is a real problem for the theory of CO2 driven, man-made warming.

What we see time and time again is one of two ‘tricks’ used by the alarmists to exaggerate or manufacture runaway warming. One is the application of ‘corrections’ which shove down the pre 1960 warm periods and raise up the most recent temperatures (see here and here).

The other ‘trick’ is to cherry pick data that supports the AGW fiction and discard data that contradicts that meme. Over at WUWT Warwick Hughes (original link) has discovered another smoking gun, showing how CRU selected stations and only used post 1950 data to create their fictional warming. When you use ALL the data, the myth of global warming magically disappears!

Likewise is this short video discussing what we are learning now from the released data sets and programs:

Its not that confirmation of any of this is surprising. Even for all their obfuscation, key planks of the AGW “science” have long been known to be fraudulent. [Update: An article by J.R. Dunn at the American Thinker rolls up all the evidence of past frauds in an exceptional article.] Michael Mann's “hockey stick graph” that the IPCC relied upon so heavily to promote AGW a decade ago, magically did away with the Medieval Warming Period and other periods of warming, thus showing a millennium long temperature constant, all ending in a huge spike in global temperatures since about 1980. It was proven an utter fraud by two Canadian computer analysts several years ago. Yet it didn't slow down the AGW juggernaut. The same is true more recently for the claims regarding Ymal tree ring study. Yet “climate scientists” and all of the vested interests simply ignored these frauds, attacked those who pointed out the AGW emperor was in the buff, and then increased the shrillness of their doomsday predictions. All of which brings us to the most pressing question, how will the AGW crowd, from Michael Mann to Al Gore to President Obama, treat the CRU file dump confirming the utter fraud, collusion and possible illegality occurring at the very core of AGW “science?”

On one hand we have the majority of AGW crowd who, in collusion with a compliant left wing press, are simply ignoring the issue. It clearly worked in the past. Thus do we have today the NYT refusing to print the e-mails because of their ethical concerns with hacking (oh spare me) and Obama going to Copenhagen as if nothing is amiss. Others are floating ancillary alternatives.

As equally surreal as Obama's trip to Copenhagen is the response of the head of UN's IPCC to this bombshell - that the IPCC's data and doomsday forecasts are accurate becasue they are all based on "peer reviewed" work.

The thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental.

According to Salon.com, AGW science is simply beyond the ken of the unwashed masses and we should simply rely on faith. The author then goes a step further, implying that disbelief in AGW is a conspiracy of the energy industry.

You can see James Delingpole at The Telegraph for a further round up of equally laughable responses.

The AGW canard survived past frauds because so many on the left and so many rent seekers have such a vested interest. We can expect they will use every means at their disposal to keep the AGW canard alive - and they hold all the levers of power in both Europe and America. I suspect that this will only unravel when members of the AGW crowd begin to publicly turn on their own in order to protect their livelihoods. And indeed, we see evidence of that already beginning to happen, with, for example, the call of IPCC scientist Eduardo Zorita to have "Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf . . . barred from the IPCC process" because "the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore." It has not made it into the MSM yet, but get a hundred more Mr. Zorita's and the MSM will no longer have any choice but to cover it. And that will mark the end to this mortal threat to Western Cvilization. To whoever released this tranche of e-mails and data from Hadley CRU, you, sir or madame, are a true hero.